Video: Smoothing blemishes while matching noise

Freckles are just a stand in for whatever densely packed luminance varied issue you are trying to take care of inside of your skin tones or throughout your image. I have gone ahead and saved my progress so far as Blurred surface.psd. This photograph comes to us from Renee Lee of iStockphoto.com. I'm going to turn off the surface blur layer to reveal the original freckled woman right here, and I'll select the Background layer to make it active. Let's press Ctrl+Alt+J again or Command+Option+J on the Mac to go ahead and jump the layer and name it at the same time. I'm going to call it D&S, which can only mean one thing, Dust & Scratches, which is the approach we are going to take this time. Click OK.

Photoshop is one of the world’s most powerful image editors, and it can be daunting to try to use skillfully. Photoshop CS4 One-on-One: Advanced, the second part of the popular and comprehensive series, follows internationally renowned Photoshop guru Deke McClelland as he dives into the workings of Photoshop. He explores such digital-age wonders as the Levels and Curves commands, edge-detection filters, advanced compositing techniques, vector-based text, the Liquify filter, and Camera Raw. Deke also teaches tried-and-true methods for sharpening details, smoothing over wrinkles and imperfections, and enhancing colors without harming the original image. Exercise files accompany the course.

Smoothing blemishes while matching noise

Freckles are just a stand in for whatever densely packed luminance varied issueyou are trying to take care of inside of your skin tones or throughout yourimage. I have gone ahead and saved my progress so far as Blurred surface.psd.This photograph comes to us from Renee Lee of iStockphoto.com. I'm going toturn off the surface blur layer to reveal the original freckled woman righthere, and I'll select the Background layer to make it active. Let's pressCtrl+Alt+J again or Command+Option+J on the Mac to go ahead and jump the layerand name it at the same time. I'm going to call it D&S, which can only mean onething, Dust & Scratches, which is the approach we are going to take this time. Click OK.

The idea behind all of these blur techniques is we are trying to do big workfast inside of an image. So we don't want to sit there and brush in an effectusing the Healing Brush for example or we can't as in the case of this imageright here, and we want to see how much stuff we can get done and how quicklywe can do it. So it's quick and dirty stuff.But this effect right here is going to require some painting. I just want towarn you in advance. We are going to start by going up to the Filter menu likewe do every single time in this chapter. And then go down to Noise and thenchoose Dust & Scratches. The reason we are choosing Dust & Scratches instead ofMedian is because Median will completely smooth over everything in the imageand Dust & Scratches gives us that threshold function which allows us to keepthe inherent digital noise. So go ahead and choose the Dust & Scratches Filterright there. And you can see we've got, whoa, kind of a weird effect at thispoint using a Radius of 16 and a Threshold of 30. But if I were to zoom in youwould see that in addition to the weird style sort of averaging that'soccurring, we are also keeping a lot of the digital noise and some low leveldetails inside the image.

So the idea here, we've got a right side up Threshold value. If two neighboringpixels are less than 30 luminance levels different from each other they willnot be affected, if they are more than 30 luminance levels different from eachother they will be affected, just as is the case for Unsharp Mask. I'm going togo ahead and take that Threshold value way down because right now we areprotecting some details that are as far apart from each other as 30 luminancelevels, which is a pretty big difference.Let's go ahead and reduce this value to 15 luminance levels and then you willsee, we are really just preserving the noise inside the image now, and we areobliterating all the details which is good, believe it or not. Now, let's goback to the Radius value and take that up to 25 for this image. I just reallywant to make those freckles, which I love so dearly, go completely away here.

And you can enter those values as well. Click OK.Now then, that's way too much right, I mean, not only are we smoothing over herface or averaging over her face really. But we are smoothing over her eyes andher nose and her mouth and her teeth and all kinds of details, her hair stuffthat we are not interested in compromising at all. So here's what we are goingto do, we are going to work with a layer mask. When you are working with alayer mask black represents temporary transparency that you are brushing at andthen white represents opacity, so if you go too far with your transparency thenyou can turn around and brush in opacity with white. And if I was to add alayer mask by clicking on this little Add Layer Mask icon down here at thebottom of the Layers palette, I would get a white layer mask like we are seeingright here. You get that additional thumbnail and that shows you thateverything in the layer is opaque because white represents opacity that's notwhat I want. I want to start from a position of transparency and build upbecause most of what I have done here, I don't want to keep.

All right, so Ctrl+Z, command+Z on the Mac to undo that modification. Press andhold the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac and click on this little guy hereAdd Layer Mask. And you will create an inverted mask, so it will be a blackmask, which makes everybody transparent, and it's temporary. I can turn it onor off. I can brush inside of it and so on. So for example, if you want to turnit off, you Shift+Click on it, if you want to turn it back on you Shift+Clickagain, and you'll see the effects of turning it off and on there inside the image window.

All right, now let's get the Brush tool, go ahead and click on it, I want abigger brush. So I'm going to increase the size of my brush by pressing theRight Bracket key and I want a really blurry brush, so I'm going to pressShift+Left Bracket a few times to get the blurriest brush possible. Then I wantto brush with white. So press the D key just to make sure that you have thosedefault colors and when you are working in a mask those default colors arewhite for foreground and black for background. So the inverse of what they arewhen you are working inside of an image. All right, now paint over her facelike so in order to make those freckles go away.

You can paint over the top of the mouth a little bit into the lips just so thatwe have a smooth transition, but I don't want you to go on painting over thingslike the nostril, do paint over this area at the top. I just want to paint overthe bridge of the nose, paint over here into the forehead. You can go ahead andpaint over the hair that's perfectly fine to do that by the way and paint overthis portion of the eye into the hair just little bit because we are going tobe backing up this effect in just a moment. Paint next to the eyes, do notpaint over the eyes that would not be a good thing at all, and then once youstart getting unnecessary, you might want to reduce the size of your brush bypressing the Left Bracket key as I'm doing here. So I'm stopping painting for amoment and then pressing the Left Bracket key and then painting, some more of course.

All right and this looks just voonderbar, I think. Now, again you might think,Deke, are we looking at the same image? That doesn't voonderbar, that looksterriblar. But here's what's so golden about this. I'm going to zoom in on thisand we are going to be backing off the effect in just a moment, don't youworry. But notice that here in the area that we have smoothed over and here inthe area that we haven't smoothed over inside the mouth, we still have the sameamount of digital noise going on. So there isn't a big abrupt transition. Thereisn't like a dead give-away that we have been inside this image other than weare sort of clod-hopping inside the image so far in terms of our editing.

And we'll now take care of that. Go head and switch back to the rectangularMarquee tool, and I want you to see something about the layer mask. If youAlt+Click or Option+Click on the layer mask, you will see the layer maskindependently at the rest of the image and doesn't it look just like that scaryguy from Scream, isn't that interesting? That transformation occurred in just afew seconds. Also note that the layer mask doesn't look very good. This isn't apiece of artwork you would hang on your wall for example presumably. It doesn'tneed to look good; it just needs to get the job done.

All right, Alt+Click or Option+Click on the Scream face again, to return Ctrlto the image or at least return visibility to the RGB composite and then withthe rectangular Marquee tool selected, I'm going to press the 5 key to reducethe Opacity value of this layer to 50% and now check it out. This is what theimage looks like originally; this is what it looks like with a dose of Dust &Scratches. Very deliberately applied, haven't lost any of the sense of filmgrain, we don't have any dead give away edits, this looks very naturalistic, weeven brought back the hair that I just painted over, beautiful, wonderful,lovely, excellent! And if you want to downplay the freckles, why would you?Because freckles are beautiful. But if you want to downplay whatever you aretrying to downplay inside the image, the more then you would also turn on yoursurface blur layer as I have done. And I would reduce the Opacity further, I'mgoing to take it down to 30% by pressing the 3 key and now we've got all thesevarious layers working together and she is not mask, the surface blur layerdoesn't really require mask. You could if you want it to, if you want to spendsome time achieving an even more careful result you can, but this is great.

So this is the original image right here, if I Alt+click or Option+Click on theeyeball from the Background layer and this is the modified version of the imagein which we've downplayed the surface variations.Thanks to the Surface Blur Filter working in concert with Dust & Scratches.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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